Lying Past
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: [pre to bk 3 canon] How can you trust your memory after it's been recreated over and over again? How can you bear punishment when it becomes your reprieve?
1. Prologue

**A/N: **Written for the 10 times 10 challenge, Potion Category, Dreamless Sleep potion, and for the If You Dare Challenge, #569 – dreams of darkness.

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**Lying Past  
1. Prologue**

_Do you trust the past? Do you trust those memories of yours that sleep within? Or are they simply echoes you've changed too many times to count, to know the original, undeformed that lay buried within – or maybe lost forever?_

_Do you even know the past, to trust it? Or do those memories slumber so deeply they are beyond even yourself? Are they buried beneath blood and sweat and the chains of punishment that wrap your body and your soul? Or have you shoved them away yourself, locked them in that black box at the back of your mind because you cannot bear to look at them any longer?_

_You will have to look at them someday though, you know? You cannot sleep with a blank mind forever. See; it already lets some light past is scaffold, yellow dots marking the black blanket you'd throttled yourself within? It might be some time still: days, years, decades…but you'll be waking up soon, and you'll be seeing the memories, that past, that you've been fleeing from._

_This was supposed to be your punishment, Sirius Black, but you turned it into a brief respite instead. Twelve years isn't enough though; that past you tried to abandon, tried to flee from, is awakening again._

_But do you trust what you see in that past? The images you've changed so thoroughly, painted over again and again with blood and grief, that the original is long since lost? Or do you seek the truth: the truth you can't bring yourself to believe because it's too forgiving to you?_

_I suppose none of that matters in the end though; reality has a way of breaking through both dreams and dreamless sleep._


	2. Part 1

**A/N: **Written for the 10 times 10 challenge, Potion Category, Drought of Living Death potion.

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**Lying Death  
Part 1**

Living death. That's what it was; my incarceration, this lonely prison of mine. Death would be kinder, but too merciful for my dark soul it seemed. Fate seemed to have decreed the heavy mist should slowly erode the essence of my life.

That's how it felt: my life, a shell that was being slowly hollowed out. The light had long since blinked out: blinked out when I realised the truth, when that horrible news had reached my ears and shattered them. When I realised I'd left the lives of my best friend and his wife and child in the hands of a traitor I'd never dreamed would betray us. When I realised what another dear friend had become, what it had led to: the body of my best friend, glassy eyed and dead but otherwise unharmed.

He'd never wanted such a death: a death that took away the marks of fighting, showed complete and utter defeat – or giving up, a person who'd stopped fighting, who'd given up seeing death coming to them. But James Potter wasn't such a man; the killing curse was just that sort of lying spell.

Me – I was going to pay for my mistake now, letting this prison eat away at my soul and the happiness I no longer deserve.


	3. Part 2

**A/N: **Written for the 10 times 10 challenge, Potion Category, Wolfsbane potion.

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**Lying Past  
Part 2**

The light of the sun and the moon didn't reach my prison; there was no reprieve to be found, no sparing from the slow erosion of my soul. The muscles around my mouth had frozen; it had been days since I'd smiled, months even perhaps. Time was irrelevant now that I was to pass the rest of my useless life within these dreary walls.

But there was something in me that seemed to refuse to die. Something that did not erode like my smile, like the memories of others smiles: James, Lily, Remus – oh, dear Remus whom I'd so horribly wronged, thinking he was the traitor when it was Peter – _that rat_ –

Maybe that was what it was. No matter what I'd done, what I deserved, that rat deserved tens – no, hundreds – of times worse. That rat who'd only pretended to befriend us, to love us. That rat who'd trampled on all the blood and sweat we'd spilt on his behalf, thinking him a friend.

Anger was something this place couldn't take away from me. Anger was the only thing I had to remind myself of a happy time I was no longer welcome to. A time I'd failed to save, to preserve. A time that was going to die in this prison with my humanity.


	4. Part 3

**A/N: **Written for the 10 times 10 challenge, Potion Category, Drought of Living Death potion.

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**Lying Past  
Part 1**

Living death. That's what it was; my incarceration, this lonely prison of mine. Death would be kinder, but too merciful for my dark soul it seemed. Fate seemed to have decreed the heavy mist should slowly erode the essence of my life.

That's how it felt: my life, a shell that was being slowly hollowed out. The light had long since blinked out: blinked out when I realised the truth, when that horrible news had reached my ears and shattered them. When I realised I'd left the lives of my best friend and his wife and child in the hands of a traitor I'd never dreamed would betray us. When I realised what another dear friend had become, what it had led to: the body of my best friend, glassy eyed and dead but otherwise unharmed.

He'd never wanted such a death: a death that took away the marks of fighting, showed complete and utter defeat – or giving up, a person who'd stopped fighting, who'd given up seeing death coming to them. But James Potter wasn't such a man; the killing curse was just that sort of lying spell.

Me – I was going to pay for my mistake now, letting this prison eat away at my soul and the happiness I no longer deserve.


	5. Part 4

**A/N: **Written for the 10 times 10 challenge, Potion Category, antidote to common poisons potion.

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**Lying Past  
Part 4**

Sometimes I forgot the hand I had to play in this sad tale; things became simpler over time and stayed like that thereafter, but guilt had been so deeply mixed with blame I could not cast it entirely aside. And that was good; part of me had been afraid of that – afraid I'd lose the reason for my punishment, the only reason for my continued existence.

But sometimes I did lose it; I had to: a small sacrifice to pay when the alternative was to lose it all. Sometimes where I felt everything: reason and anger and punishment and all, I'd curl up in to a dog and let empty words tell the tale until the emotions came alive again.

In those small breaths, I wondered if this imprisonment of mind hadn't changed these memories: these images I built from scratch over and over from empty words I repeated to myself lest I forget those things as well. But words could be interpreted differently; did James' smile change a little each time I forgot and remembered again.

But it was the only way I could remember at all. The only way I could hang on to those meanings, those emotions: stay something other than just an empty shell so I could pay for this sin of mine.

And sometimes, in the anger, I forgot that sin of mine as well.


	6. Part 5

**A/N: **Written for the 10 times 10 challenge, Potion Category, polyjuice potion.

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**Lying Past  
Part 5**

I became a dog more often and a human less – if there was any human left in me after rotting away in this prison for countless days. It was easier that way: I was growing lax, less faithful…even less angry, less guilty…

I don't know when it happened; I thought that decay of my soul had frozen to let me live out my sentence. Apparently it hadn't, because I could blink and find another echo of that anger, of that guilt, fading away into the ravenous mist. Part of me was afraid: the anger and guilt was, for the longest time, all I'd had left. Now I was losing those as well.

I tried to hang on to them, tried to pretend I was that dog who couldn't lose human memories, that could remember the smells of James' smelly socks and Harry's nappies, that could remember the smell of an antler and a werewolf and a rat –

And, luckily, that's enough to spark a little anger, enough to bring a face to mind – and, from there, a rush of other faces: some smiling, some laughing, others looking fuzzy and holding no expression at all…

They might have been other people's faces, but they were all I could remember, all I could hold on to. They might be dreams now – but the despair eating what's left of my soul is very real.


	7. Part 6

**A/N: **Written for the 10 times 10 challenge, Potion Category, felix felices potion.

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**Lying Past  
Part 6**

At some point, my mind began to clear. I don't know how, or why, just that it did and I was more confident in my memories, in my guilt, in my anger and my powerlessness –

And then I saw _him_ again. That rat.

It was a stroke of luck. I felt human that day; sometimes I could delude myself, so I could justify myself in my anger, drown in the deep stabbing wounds of my guilt. I tried to make myself more human, to indulge in that illusion even more, when I saw it: the picture, of _him_: that little rat posing as a garden variety and hiding.

Then I saw the name as well, and I remembered fear for the first time in so many years. And it was fear, because he was so close, so close to the only thing that remained that was important to me – Harry, James' son, the only thing that his betrayal hadn't managed, for whatever reason, to steal.

A few things went through my head. A desire to protect: protect Harry. A desire to grovel at his feet and ask for forgiveness. And a desire to hunt that rat and feel his back bone crunch beneath sharp jaws.

It was a stroke of luck, but I was alive again because of it.


	8. Part 7

**A/N: **Written for the 10 times 10 challenge, Potion Category, Amortentia potion.

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**Lying Past  
Part 7**

My mind was consumed by a single thought, a single task. Escape. That was all. I had to escape.

It wasn't an easy task: an impossible one, but I had lost the meaning of that word long ago. It had to happen, so I'd make it happen. I had to do this thing, before all these feelings vanished again.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I knew I had to find them: Harry, and that rat. I had to find them. I had to get out of this prison.

I'd forgotten by then it was supposed to by my punishment, my eternal solitude. That was gone now: I had other purposes. I hadn't failed completely. There was still Harry. He could forgive me. I could save him from that sneaky little rat before he did something again.

I went from dog to human to human to dog, and eventually, without thought and just repeating those words: "escape, escape," eventually I did manage to escape. A dog slipping through the bars, past the guards, into the cold ocean water. I escaped, with those words driving me just like the empty words of my memories had allowed me to rebuild them again and again when they slipped away.

My prison was gone, drowned in the cold ocean war I'd jumped upon.


	9. Part 8

**A/N: **Written for the 10 times 10 challenge, Potion Category, Veritaserum potion.

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**Lying Past  
Part 8**

The ocean water washed away the mist that had eroded my bones, leaving just the thoughts that were my driving force, all that was left of my soul.

Harry and Peter Pettigrew. They were all that were left. The mist, the confusion, the tears shed for a despair I didn't understand were all stolen by the cold blast of water that swamped me. The desire to die, to pay the ultimate price I didn't deserve to give, was washed away as well. Instinct took over: I struggled to the surface, struggled away from the prison, towards freedom and the only things I had left in this world.

I knew what the truth was, now, the truth I'd doubted for so long, that I'd forgotten after those first few days, few weeks, of despair. Those memories I feared I had recreated myself, to justify my imprisonment, to lay waste to someone else to hold on to that little bit of hope.

But the guilt was paramount, and so was the anger, the hatred, towards that traitor – and the guilt wasn't enough to drown me because the anger was there, the hatred, and that was a driving warming force forcing me across the sea and dragging my failing weak body to the shore so I could act upon that anger and that desire for protection and revenge.


	10. Epilogue

**A/N: **Written for the 10 times 10 challenge, Potion Category, Murtlap Essence potion.

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**Lying Past  
Epilogue**

_You have forgotten your doubts, cast them into the oceans. I suppose it cannot be helped: doubt is a far more hungry beast than despair, and the Dementors cannot kill. Doubt can. Doubt has: it killed your friend after all: because you didn't trust one friend enough, you chose instead the friend who, in the end, couldn't be trusted._

_And then your memories died: dwindled under the heavy mist of despair. You kept them, simplified them into words and used those as building blocks to build them up again, soft cream on the light wounds wishing them away despite knowing they would come again, that it would hurt again. _

_And now none of it matters: you've thrown the doubt aside, taken those memories for what they are, what they've turned out to be. It doesn't matter anymore, how much guilt is for you to bear and how much was unjustly placed upon you. It doesn't matter how much anger – that anger you now recognise as hatred – is just, and how much is your own suffering bypassing your saintly acceptance and looking for blame. _

_But one day you're going to have to go back to those doubts, and you'll wonder once again where you began to change things, whether they did change at al or you're just second-guessing yourself._

_And who knows. There was no-one to remember for you after all, thanks to doubt._


End file.
